Borderliners

Michiko Kakutani

"Borderliners" is a willfully elliptical narrative that often tries the reader's patience. . . . These highly abstract soliloquies are apparently meant to add resonance to Peter's story, and to underscore one of the novel's central themes concerning the dehumanizing effects of science and the scientific method. Unfortunately they have another effect entirely: they weigh the story down, turning what might have been a deeply affecting story about a young boy's painful coming of age into a lugubrious and strangely impersonal allegory. -- New York Times

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The second of Danish writer Heg's novels to be translated into English (following Smilla's Sense of Snow) concerns a trio of misfits at an elite boarding school who discover they are guinea pigs in a sinister experiment. (Nov.)

Library Journal

In this extraordinary novel, Hoeg portrays the closed world of Biehl's, a Danish private school where a bizarre social experiment is underway. The narrator, Peter, is now a student at Biehl's after spending all of his life in children's homes and reform schools. He is a borderline case, along with Katarina, whose parents both died in the past year, and August, severely disturbed after killing his abusive parents. Although allowed no social interaction, the children conspire to conduct their own experiment to discover what plan is being carried out at Biehl's. Hoeg touches on some of the same themes as in his acclaimed Smilla's Sense of Snow (LJ 8/93)-neglected children, scientific experiments, and technology-but this is not a thriller and may not appeal to the same audience. It is instead a fascinating intellectual puzzle that explores the themes of social control, child assessment, family, and the concept of time. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 8/94.]-Patrica Ross, Westerville, Ohio

Emily Melton

After the astounding critical and popular success of his first book ("Smilla's Sense of Snow", 1993), it wouldn't be entirely unexpected if Hoeg produced a less-successful sequel. But his second novel--a complete departure from "Smilla"--is even more brilliantly stunning than his first. "Borderliners" focuses on a 14-year-old orphan named, oddly, Peter Hoeg. Hoeg has been incarcerated in custodial institutions all of his young life, and he matter-of-factly recounts the cruelties of daily life that he has come to accept as normal. His latest "home" is Biehl's School, where most students are academically gifted and from good backgrounds. Peter can't understand why he has been allowed to join these exalted ranks, but he soon finds that other of society's "borderliners" have also been brought to the school. Among these misfits, he is attracted to the older, wiser Katarina and to August, a tiny murderer who killed his parents after years of suffering unimaginable abuse. The three begin to believe there is a grand scheme behind their placement at the school, that the staff may be conducting a strange and misguided experiment that could end in disaster. Hoeg's story reveals a harsh and grotesque world in which most of us could never survive. But it also suggests that there is hope--in the form of peace, if not happiness--for those like Peter who have been the victims of life. Disturbing, brilliant, and searing.

From Barnes & Noble

Students in an elite private school in Copenhagen discover that the school is using them in an experiment to control children--an experiment that, almost inevitably, has tragic consequences. A disturbing new book from the author of Smilla's Sense of Snow.